Overseas Experience Enhances Employability

Date added: Tuesday 10th April 2012

JCB designs and builds more than 300 types of machines, including diggers. Founded by Joseph Cyril Bamford in 1945, JCB employs over 7,000 people and operates in over 150 countries. Over 90% of its business is done overseas and it is constantly on the lookout for people who are willing to relocate abroad to set up factories or sell products. It strikes me that people who have used their gap year wisely to gain a sound knowledge of the culture and customs of another country and so demonstrate flexibility and adaptability should have an advantage.

JCB is one of the best known British manufacturing businesses with a high and well deserved international reputation. Yet when Louisa Peacock, the Jobs Editor of The Daily Telegraph, visited JCB recently she was told by David Bell, JCB's HR director that the company struggles to recruit the right people for the right jobs. At the same time experienced and engineers and graduates were telling Ms Peacock that JCB was a difficult company to get into.

David Bell suggested that many candidates had the skills but failed to sell themselves. "JCB recruitment is always around attitude. We are looking for can-do, practical people who make things happen, have a sense of urgency and a bit of an edge. We can train for the other stuff," he told Louisa Peacock.

JCB is looking for efficiency, flexibility, commercial awareness, technical innovation and people who can work abroad. It is on this latter requirement that those that have taken a gap year overseas should have an advantage. But also the very fact that they have planned and completed a successful gap year programme will demonstrate that they have a can-do attitude and a bit of an edge.

JCB welcomes speculative applications. So if you think you have what it takes to work for one of Britain's leading firms start researching JCB.

Have you any experience of a gap year overseas helping you secure a job?

Louisa peacock's article "What it takes to impress the UK's leading firms" appeared in the Business section of The Daily Telegraph on 5th April 2012. Watch a video by JCB's David Bell.